He struggles, falls, tumbling to the jungle floor. The other members of his troop watch the spectacle, the chorus cacophony of their jittering laughter echoing across the treetops through the humid air of the primordial jungle.

He lies still, prone, in shock from the fall. A shoot of pain--the sharp gash runs across his forehead, dirt and blood and hair mingling, dribbling down to form a vital mixture on the mudcake floor.

The cilia within his ears--the product of untold millennia of evolutionary honing--receive each fine modulation of the troop's hectoring calls; his brain translates the signals into a semblance of primitive meaning. And in his rudimentary way, he understands he is the object of their ridicule.

High above him, through a small opening in the verdant canopy of his jungle home, there is the cerulean of sky. Staring upward at its center, he sights the faint, pale outline of the morning moon, the distant beacon awash in the vastness of space. He fixates on the impossible object, captured in its ghostly luminescence, time slowing, sound softening, space collapsing all around until there is nothing else in his apprehended existence.

All at once, a glimmer-glint shine appears in his eyes; this firstfireflash, never before seen in Earth's long, empty history. Turning himself over, he pushes back against the surface geography of the ground. The troop has fallen silent. He begins to rise.